The Art of Pixar Documents 25 Years of Brilliance

It's hard to believe that Pixar Animation Studios has been around for 25 years. In that quarter-century, the studio has reinvigorated the animated-film genre, creating memorable characters that in many ways seem more real than the human actors in some live-action movies.

The Art of Pixar: The Complete Colorscripts and Select Art From 25 Years of Animation (Chronicle Books, $50) shows us how those wonderful movies came into being, from Toy Story to Wall-E. A hardcover collection of scripts and artwork from all the studio's movies, the book was written by Amid Amidi, co-founder of animation blog Cartoon Brew, and features a foreword by Disney ex-pat John Lasseter, who worked for the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm that would become Pixar after Steve Jobs purchased the company in 1986.

To get a taste of the creative thought that went into making some of our favorite animated movies, Wired.com asked Amidi to offer commentary on some of the coolest images from his new book. Check out the artwork, along with Amidi's commentary, in the gallery above, then hit the comments and let us know all about your favorite Pixar flick.

Above:

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Sometimes filmmakers imbue meaning into a specific color. In Toy Story 3, director Lee Unkrich chose the color blue to represent safety and home. Unkrich explained that it's no coincidence that in the early scenes of the film, "[Andy's] bedroom is blue, the sky is blue, his T-shirt is blue. He is in blue jeans, he's got a blue car." —Amid Amidi

Illustration: Dice Tsutsumi, digital (2009)

The Incredibles (2004)

The nonlinear production process of computer-animated films can make it difficult for a filmmaker to envision how a film will look until late in the process. Colorscripting allows the filmmaker see the entire scope of a film and understand its key emotional beats in one colorful piece of artwork. The bold shapes and colors in Lou Romano's color script for The Incredibles deviated from the pastel look of earlier Pixar colorscripts. The finished film had a similarly stylized production design with a high-contrast palette. —Amid Amidi

Illustration: Lou Romano, digital (2002)

Toy Story (1995)

Colorscripts provide a roadmap for shifts in color, lighting, emotion and mood throughout a film. The roots of colorscripting in animated films can be traced back to the Disney features of the early 1940s as well as the theatrical shorts produced at the modernist animation studio United Productions of America in the mid-1940s.

In the contemporary era, the process was resurrected on Disney's 1992 film Aladdin. Since then, no studio has placed as great an emphasis on colorscripting as Pixar, which has created a color script for all 12 of their features. The seed was planted by Ralph Eggleston, who created a colorscript on his own initiative during the production of Pixar's first feature, Toy Story. —Amid Amidi

Illustration: Ralph Eggleston, Pastel (1993)

Wall-E (2008)

The quiet first act of Wall-E ranks among Pixar's most experimental attempts at storytelling. The film's production designer, Ralph Eggleston, furthered the audience's emotional attachment to the main character Wall-E through thoughtful manipulation of color and light.

Eggleston didn't create a colorscript for some of the later acts of the film. "I actually felt really guilty for not doing it," he said. Even though there wasn't a colorscript for every sequence, his art-direction team still created plenty of color keys and pre-viz scenes to plan the look of the film. —Amid Amidi

Illustration: Ralph Eggleston, digital (2007)

Cars (2006)

An infinite amount of control over lighting is available to the CG filmmaker. Bill Cone, who created pastel colorscripts for A Bug's Life and Cars, reveled in these possibilities by exploring the effects of natural light in his colorscripts. A talented plein-air artist outside of the studio, Cone spent a lot of time outdoors observing the endless variations of the sun's effects on the environment. "I've learned that literally any type of day [scene] can be evil, sad, happy, joyous, miserable ... that there's no rule," Cone said. "It can be anything the story tells it to be and it's your job to actually make it correct. It's more like connecting what you believe a feeling can represent to what the story is saying. How do you best express that?" —Amid Amidi

Illustration: Bill Cone, pastel (2004-2005)

Ratatouille (2007)

Production designer Harley Jessup likes to exploit the contrasting textures of different locations in the films he's worked on like Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille. His colorscript for Ratatouille emphasized the damp underground sewers against the warm, rich tones of the human world that Remy yearned to be a part of. —Amid Amidi

Up (2009)

After Carl's wife dies in the film Up, his world turns bleak. The colorful balloons in Up are not just aesthetically attractive, but they serve an emotional purpose by reintroducing color into Carl's world. More color is introduced in the form of Russell and his cheerful sash of Wilderness Explorer merit badges and the rainbow plumage of the bird Kevin. —Amid Amidi